Flute Player

K. S. Kulkarni’s extensive international experience and his simultaneous rootedness in Indian ethos helped him evolve a unique individual language. Abstraction and the pursuit of form, along with a deep understanding of colour, were his lifelong quests and this oil on canvas, Flute Player, bears it out. This modernist rendition of an image associated with Krishna—or of the Indian peasant whose concerns he painted frequently—has a cubist vocabulary accentuated by Kulkarni’s distinct thick line with which he delineates the central elements of the work such as the player’s profile, his arms, and the flute.